Quizzes and tests are common in academic settings. However, they are becoming more common in the workplace as well. One area in which they have gained in importance is in recruitment, especially for jobs requiring a large number of employees having considerable technical skills, such as engineers or computer programmers. In those areas, quizzes and tests may be used to ensure that the applicant pool has sufficient technical qualifications before applying human resource time to interviewing the candidates.
Since businesses are joining academicians as test-givers, unsurprisingly there is an increased emphasis placed on cost-efficiency in the creation of tests and quizzes. While the time it takes a person to choose a set of questions from a large repository of ready-made questions may be adequate for academia, that person's time may be far more valuable in the business setting. Thus, businesses have sought to automate this selection process.
One way to automate the process is to simply randomly pick questions from a database of questions. For example, a Star Office™ (created by Sun Microsystems, Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif.) document storing the database of questions may be accessed, with random questions being selected using a random number generator in a conventional manner. A drawback of this method, however, is that it does not provide for sections within the database, without the random question picking program knowing ahead of time what sections exist in the database. For example, a database of standardized high school test questions may be divided into “English” and “Math” sections, with the program picking a certain number of random “English” questions and a certain number of random “Math” questions. This, however, forces the program to be aware of the section when the program is created, limiting its portability. In essence, each time a new type of test is created the program must be redesigned.
Furthermore, computerized testing programs in the past have focused on the case where the testee is taking the test on the computer, leaving largely unexamined the case where the computer is merely a tool for the tester in the creation of written tests. For example, in the case where written tests are to be prepared, it is often preferable to not only randomly generate tests, but to also make corresponding answer keys for the tester to use in grading the test. Previous solutions have not examined how to integrate this need into the computerized system, as such answer keys are unnecessary when the testee takes the test on the computer.
What is needed is a solution which allows a portable test generation program to dynamically generate written tests and answer keys on-the-fly.